If we had continued practicing conventional farming, we would have cut down millions of acres of forest, thereby destroying wildlife habitat, in order to increase cropland to produce enough food for an escalating population. And we would have to use more herbicides in more fields, which would damage the environment even more. Technology allows us to have less impact on soil erosion, biodiversity, wildlife, forests, and grasslands.
ActionBioscience.org: Can farmers in developing nations access biotech products?
Borlaug: In spite of biotech’s great potential, access is a problem. Most of the research on crops is conducted by private enterprise and corporations hold patents on their inventions. Farmers in developing nations have little resources. How can they afford these patented products? Global governments need to seriously address the problem.
Governments also need to address issues such as framework for testing genetically modified foods, funding research in the public sector, and educating the public better about agricultural science and technology. Most people in the “western” world are urbanites and they don’t know what it takes to feed the world. These people can afford to buy expensive “organic” food and to criticize genetically modified food. They pressure governments to ban genetically modified foods and that could be disastrous for developing nations.
ActionBioscience.org: What do you see for the Green Revolution in this century?
Borlaug: The Green Revolution is an ongoing continuum. Millions of people are currently undernourished in the world. The world population for 2025, at a medium fertility rate, is projected to be about 8.3 billion people. I calculate that we will need an additional one billion tons of grain by then. We have to increase yields to feed these people – more bushels per acre, more tons per hectare. Higher yields are especially important now due to spreading urbanization, which takes away agricultural land. We need to use both conventional breeding and biotechnology methods to meet the challenges of this century.
During the past decade Dr. Borlaug has been working in Africa. He faced the challenges of developing grain that would grow there, conflicts with eco imperialists and a multitude of governments. Paul Driessen has an article from abetterearth.org and writes the following.
“What about the people?” asks Fifi Kobusingye, a designer and businesswoman in Kampala, Uganda. “The mosquitoes are everywhere. You think you’re safe and you’re not. Europeans and Americans can afford to deceive themselves about malaria and pesticides. But we can’t.” “If we don’t use DDT,” adds David Nabarro, director of Roll Back Malaria, “the results will be measured in loss of life,” and our countries will never be able to escape from poverty.
“If they don’t have electricity, people will cut down our trees,” senior Kampala government official Gordon Mwesgye says bluntly. Africa will lose its wildlife habitats, health and economic benefits will continue to elude it, and contaminated air and water will continue to kill millions every year. Wind and solar power will never provide enough electricity for a modern Africa. Only fossil fuel, hydroelectric and nuclear power plants can do that.
“Foreign aid is like life support for corrupt politicians who keep their people poor,” argues James Shikwati, president of the Inter Region Economic Network (IREN) in Nairobi. “We need free and open trade, and access to modern technology.”

“Biotechnology could replace crops that are being devastated by disease and drought. It could help feed people, and prevent blindness and deaths, by ensuring that people get enough Vitamin A and other nutrients,” IREN’s June Arunga points out.

“There are 6.6 billion people on the planet today,” says Dr. Norman Borlaug, biotech proponent and father of the Green Revolution. “With organic farming we could only feed 4 billion of them. Which 2 billion would volunteer to die?”
As Africa remains in the headlines with an HIV/AIDS epidemic and starvation conditions corrupt, kleptocratic governments remain a critical problem for many African nations. They must be replaced by honest administrations that serve the needs of all their citizens. However, even if this occurs, a strong, prosperous Africa will never arise, until it has DDT to kill the mosquitoes that infect 250,000,000 Africans every year, and kill 2,000,000; ample, reliable, affordable electricity for homes, hospitals, schools and factories; trade to generate opportunity and prosperity; biotechnology to end malnutrition and give Africa a better chance to compete with rich nations that subsidize their farmers with hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It should be easy. After all, Europe and America used the same technologies to solve the same problems decades ago. But today radical eco-imperialists stand in Africa’s way. They talk about “saving the planet” from all sorts of theoretical catastrophes, citing concerns that they can afford to have, because they no longer have to worry about diseases, malnutrition and near absence of electricity that still plague Africa.
They promote “sustainable” development and agriculture, “appropriate” energy technology like solar panels on huts, and other “solutions” that have no basis in science, economics or Africa’s situation. They can afford to talk about this, too, because they live in comparative splendor, while millions of Africans continue to live in squalor.
Worst of all, they present their anti-humanity agenda in vague, lofty terms like corporate social responsibility and environmental ethics. These terms appeal strongly to politicians, journalists, foundations, government agencies and even clergy that fund and support the US $8 billion-a-year eco-activist industry. But the effects are lethal for Africans – and the agendas are hardly responsible, moral or compassionate.
“I appreciate ethical concerns,” says Kenyan plant scientist Florence Wambugu, “but anything that doesn’t help feed our children is unethical.” The only things the Green (not the Green Revolution) agenda sustains, says Tuskegee University plant genetics professor CS Prakash, are “poverty, malnutrition and early death.”
GM foods and grains are at the forefront of where agri-science is going today. contentious debates will erupt over much of what is discussed in the following segment.
Africa’s life-or-death problems must not be shackled any longer to vague and emotional claims about the needs of future generations of wealthy Americans and Europeans. Leon Louw, director of South Africa’s Free Market Foundation, puts it very directly: “Telling destitute people in my country, and in countries with even greater destitution, that they must never aspire to living standards much better than they have now – because it wouldn’t be ‘sustainable’ – is just one example of the hypocrisy we have had thrust in our faces, in an era when we can and should grow fast enough to become fully developed in a single generation. We’re fed up with it.”
“Scientists must play a role in breaking the lock jam that exists in the adoption of biotechnology in the world,” Dr. Norman Borlaug, told scientists attending a conference in Bologna, Italy.
“We seem to be talking to ourselves,” he lamented and challenged scientists to be more proactive in communicating the solutions they had developed to address current world problems. “The situation that we find ourselves in is a serious threat to science. We need one or two breakthrough successes that will convince the world solutions exist to current global problems.”
Monkombu Swaminathan, from the Swaminathan Foundation in India said “scientists must desist from speaking in technical terms. If the civil society, politicians, policymakers and the public are to embrace biotechnology and science in general, then we must make it clear that science and its applications are instruments of safeguarding the human right to food and basic human requirements.”
Ethiopian Dr. Gebsia Ejeta, from Purdue University in the USA, challenged scientists “not to be enslaved by the power of the technology you manipulate” and instead seek inter-disciplinary cooperation to get findings out to those who need it most.
Dr. Allessandro Pellegrineschi from CIMMYT in Mexico said technology was moving so fast that politicians and policymakers were not able to adopt in their decision making. He said there was need to co-op agro-economists who would be better placed to the contribution of science to the current world problems.
Turning to Africa Borlaug said the continent needs a courageous political leader to throw his weight behind biotechnology for other countries to open up. He lamented that “although technology exists to completely transform the continent, this information is tangled up in lack of political will.” He predicted that once results from the adoption begin getting into the public domain “biotechnology will spread like wild fire, just as the Green Revolution spread in the 60s and 70s in Asia.”
The Director of Communications at A Harvest Biotech Foundation International (AHBFI), Daniel Kamanga, told scientists that although agriculture is Africa’s engine of economic development, there is little or no coverage of agri-biotech issues by the media.
“It is sad that today, science has most of the solutions that Africa and the world faces, yet these solutions cannot be adopted because of serious communication gaps. The anti-GM lobby, especially in Africa, has exploited this.
The world has the technology already available to feed on a sustainable basis, a population of 10 billion people, Dr. Norman Borlaug, told scientists attending a conference in Bologna, Italy.
He however lamented that access to this technology was not assured because of issues related to “intellectual property rights, technology acceptance by civil society and governments and financial and educational barriers.” Dr. Borlaug said these issues had kept poor farmers marginalized and unable to adopt the new technologies.
On a more positive note the scientist noted that although global cereal production has more than doubled expanding faster than world population growth, biotechnology and genetic engineering had contributed tremendously to environmental protection and biodiversity sustenance by increasing production while leaving untouched vast areas of land for other purposes.
Dr. Borlaug said contrary to views by the anti-GM lobby, biotechnology contributed to environmental protection and biodiversity sustenance. “Environmental protection and sustainable growth is based on making the poor prosperous and GM technology seeks to do this.” He said the 21st Century would need to bring about a “Blue Revolution,” one in which “water-use productivity is much more closely wedded to land-use productivity.”
The scientist said “significant water use efficiency can be achieved in irrigated areas through conservation tillage, planting on beds and drip irrigation.” He said the continued genetic improvement of food crops using both conventional as well as biotechnology research tools was needed “to shift the yield frontier and increase stability of yield.”
Dr. Borlaug said 50% of the world’s 800 million poor and hungry people (of which half are in Africa) live in marginal lands and depend upon agriculture for their livelihoods. Saying that “some of the problems in such environments will be too formidable to overcome,” the scientist predicted that “biotechnology will play an important role in developing new germplasm with greater tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses with higher nutritional content.”
He said that over the next 20 years, would cereal demand was likely to increase by 40-50% driven strongly by rapidly growing animal feed use and meat consumption. With exceptions of acid-soil areas in South America and Africa, the potential for expanding the global land use is limited. “Future expansion in food production must come largely from land already in use (and) the productivity of these lands must be sustained and improved.
Amazingly, at age 90, Dr. Borlaug is working on the continent that is receiving so much world attention due to its emerging governments, its HIV/AIDS crisis and soaring population. Dr. Borlaug has also had to work harder on the latter since western governments and their development agencies no longer countenance methods of this initial Green Revolution that saved millions in Asia in the 1960s. The feeling is now that the free market should determine how Africa feeds itself. In Ghana, where Dr. Borlaug worked extensively, western creditors have applied pressure so that the cheap financing Dr. Borlaug started the farmers on is now costing them a 30 percent interest on loans.
In turn, the villages are skipping on fertilizers resulting in a third less yield, and, without a well functioning market for their crops it is difficult to sell even these diminishing yields before they rot. Hence, villages switched to crops such as cocoa they can sell to the west but which do not provide sustenance for their own lives. For Ghana, at least, a staple food such as corn goes lacking.
Sub-Saharan Africa, where Borlaug is finishing his career is approaching its worst food crisis. 3.8 million people are threatened with starvation, millions with HIV are without any nourishment. Since western support, financial and political, that spurred or invited the Green Revolution is no longer a given. Dr. Borlaug has solved his second Green Revolution by obtaining 9 million a year from the foundation of the late Japanese Magnate Ryoichi Sasakawa. With the funding he works with President Carter’s Atlanta based Carter Center to develop seventeen mini demonstration plots in 10 Africa countries. Dr. Borlaug now says “I’ve done my job” and “something has to change.” But western finances now maintain Africa should work on developing tourism etc. rather than trying to increase crop yield to feed itself. The contention is that money coming in from such industries would give them money to buy their own food. The irony, of course, is that these same western nations continue to subsidize their own farmers to produce more output. Dr. Borlaug remains steadfast:
“In order to understand the role that biotechnology could play in eradicating human hunger, we need to take into account the problems faced by farmers around the world. We need to educate ourselves for our birds’ benefit and for our own as citizens of the U.S. and also as members of a bigger community. We should distinguish between agricultural practices that are reckless and polluting and those that are healthy and acceptable. We should understand why organic gardening might not always be appropriate and make the distinction between “nonorganic” nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides.
“Biotech has a big potential in Africa, not immediately, but down the road. Five to eight years from now, parts of it will play a role there. Take the case of maize with the gene that controls the tolerance level for the weed killer Roundup. Roundup kills all the weeds, but it’s short-lived, so it doesn’t have any residual effect, and from that standpoint it’s safe for people and the environment. The gene for herbicide tolerance is built into the crop variety, so that when a farmer sprays he kills only weeds but not the crops. Roundup Ready soybeans and corn are being very widely used in the U.S and Argentina. At this stage, we haven’t used varieties with the tolerance for Roundup or any other weed killer [in Africa], but will have a role to play. – Dr. Norman Borlaug in an interview with Reason Online
Borlaug continues (in an interview with Joy Powell of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.)
“We’ve still got 800 million people that need more food,” Borlaug said in an interview. So many people go hungry around the world, he said, not because there isn’t enough food to go around, but because they’re too poor to buy or produce it.
A white-haired, energetic man, Borlaug spoke of what drives him to work from sunup to sundown at an age when most others are comfortable ensconced in retirement. It’s the thought of starving children who can barely stand on spindly legs – children barely alive, many of whom die.”
“I hate poverty and misery,” Borlaug said, his boyish face full of anger. “I’ve seen people suffering.”
Amid his busy schedule, Borlaug continues his alliances with agricultural scientists around the world, such as M.S. Swaminathan – India’s most famous scientist. Borlaug is most concerned however, with his efforts in Africa, where he, former President Jimmy Carter and the Sasakawa family of Japan are trying to bring a new Green Revolution in food production to millions of small-scale farmers.
“African food production remains in crisis, even though technology is available to double or triple yields of the major food crops,” he said at the commencement speech at the University of Minnesota College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences.
“Technology is available to African Farmers who work tiny patches of land,” he said, “but production is thwarted by deplorable infrastructure and bureaucracy, which he finds ‘infuriating.’”
“Unless Africa’s rural infrastructure and institutions are significantly improved – especially transport systems, energy, water, schools and clinics – all other efforts to reduce poverty, hunger, improve health and education and secure peace and prosperity will continue to fail,” he said.
Worldwide, agricultural technology has improved food availability, yet the need remains the same. In 2002, the United Nations estimated that about 24,000 people die of hunger-related causes each day around the globe.
“Population growth has eased,” Borlaug said, “but the world is still adding nearly 80 million people a year, posing the daunting challenge of doubling food production to feed the 9 billion to 10 billion people likely to be on earth by the end of the 21st century.”
“Beyond that, there’s the desperate need for equitable distribution so the food reaches those who need it most,” he said.
In May 2004 Dr. Borlaug returned to the University of Minnesota togive an address at the commencement ceremony at the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences. From a conversation with former governor Elmer L. Andersen writer Lori Sturdevent records the following comments that shows us where Dr. Borlaug stands today.
Andersen: I’ve heard the story that you started working to bring the Green Revolution to (Sub-Saharan) Africa when Dr. Ryoichi Sasakawa called you right after you retired and said “Young man, I’m 15 years older than you are, and I’m not retiring. Let’s get busy.” Is this a true story?
Borlaug: It was 1981 …. He said just what you quoted. He said, “We should have started yesterday. Let’s start tomorrow.”
And so we started. We’ve got some of the worst frustrations I’ve ever had, because the infrastructure there. The roads and the railroads aren’t there, and if there’s no roads, there’s no schools. There’s no medical care. When you bring roads, soon there will be a one-room country school, then a lot of them along the road. More important, there will be a beat-up bus or truck moving down that road, and it crosses ethnic, linguistic, social barriers, and it breaks down people’s fear of one another. It starts to change everything. Without that, we’re stuck.
Andersen: Is research running ahead of application of the better crops and farming method you have developed?
Borlaug: Where there are problems, it tends to be with distribution. Take India and China, travel in China today, and you don’t see hungry, emaciated people. The masses are strong and healthy.
You go to India, where they have been self-sufficient in food production since 1973, and you have big stacks of grain in the government warehouses, and you see many emaciated people but they are not starving to death in big numbers, like they were. But with the employment that they have, they can only buy enough to keep themselves alive, not to grow healthy bodies and work effectively.
I’ve never been interested in equitable distribution of poverty. You’ve got to produce the grain first. Then you’ve got to get it distributed. India has done the first, but is still working on a way to do the second.
Andersen: At one point, your (Green Revolution movement) had 16 substations. How many are there now?
Borlaug: There are 14. Four of them were put together into two.
The sad thing is that the budget for all of those institutions has gone down dramatically from the funding from affluent nations, our own included, and the World Bank are way down, but they also have a lot more bureaucracy, siphoning off the funding that used to go down to the to the little people. We’re in trouble.
Andersen: it’s one of the most important activities in the whole world, to bring up the people out of poverty. And yet it lacks prominence.
Borlaug: It’s something we have to keep working on, and it’s a constant fight. Here we in the U.S. and in the western European countries, we have somewhere between 2 and 3 percent of the total population involved in production of food and fiber crops today. When I was a boy, I suppose it was 30 to 35 percent. Most of the people today come from urban areas that haven’t any idea how to put the package together, in order to produce more food.
What also complicates our work now is the new biotechnology. That’s something people don’t understand, and so they tend to fear it. We can do things that we couldn’t do before. Before when we tried to cross plants distantly related, they were sterile. With the new biotech, we can actually make things. The results can be very successful…. [For example,] just by putting one little gene into corn, you can reduce greatly, 70, 80 percent, the insecticide we used to use. That’s of great benefit to the environment.
The Europeans imply that we are pretty reckless in the use of new technology. I’m not really convinced of that. I was trained in forestry. I’ve got quite a few shades of green in me. Not the extreme green that some of these who operate on Cloud Nine have. When people are suffering from hunger, you have to make certain choices.
Andersen: I’ve wondered if there’s a role that Minnesota should be playing, in your honor, to keep the work going.
Borlaug: I think that the University of Minnesota’s international program is making a good start. They are limited by funds, of course. But the dean (Charles Muscoplat) is well aware of the need and is doing everything he can, within the limits of his budget, to make a contribution between research and agriculture around the world, to get the knowledge to the farms when they need it.
While at the University of Minnesota in May Borlaug also spoke to Jane Kubel, the agri news staff writer.
Infrastructure problems hamper agriculture and all development in Sub-Saharan Africa, Dr. Norman Borlaug told the state’s new crop of FFA officers. In India and Pakistan, where Borlaug was successful in increasing agricultural production, railroads reached fields because Great Britain built them to ship India’s cotton. In the Sub-Saharan roads were built to the mines and the agriculture was neglected.
A tremendous HIV problem exists in Africa, Borlaug said. Food, medicine and schools are scarce. The continent is a hotbed for extremism, which spreads to neighboring countries.
Ghana, Borlaug said, had done well, but most Sub-Saharan African countries need help to get away from poverty. The World Bank needs to take the lead, if only by developing a preliminary plan for roads across the continent.
Roads would allow farmers to bring commodities to market and doctors and schools, Borlaug said. Schools bring buses, which break down cultural, ethnic and religious barriers as they travel along those roads.
Borlaug said he remains committed to helping African farmers increase food production for their families, telling the FFAers that the initiative needs two touchdowns and then invention will follow.
As an afterthought and to help us look at the whole panorama of Dr. Borlaug’s work it is worthwhile to note that China’s population growth is now coming under control.
According to Attar Chand from The Hindu financial daily the work in China has stabilized and long term results are evident.
China has been more successful in achieving broadbased economic growth and poverty reduction than India.
The US scientist said that Nobel Economics laureate Prof Amarty Sen attributed this to the greater priority the Chinese Government invested in rural education and health care services. Nearly 80n percent of the Chinese population is literate, while only 50 percent of the Indian population can read and write.
More than half of India’s population languishes below the poverty line, whereas in China this figure is lass than 30 percent. Only 17 percent of Chinese children are malnourished compared to 63 percent in India.
With a healthier and better-educated rural population, the Chinese economy has grown twice as fast as the Indian economy over the past two decades. Today, China’s per capita income is twice India’s. The key to feeding mushrooming global population is allowing farmers of developing countries access to high-yielding biotechnology.
The technology to feed as many as 10 billion people in 2025 either exists or is being developed. The pertinent question is whether farmers will b permitted to use this new technology.
Meanwhile, agriculturists and environmentalists must quickly resolve what constitutes sustainable agriculture in the developing world. Dr. Borlaug and most other agricultural scientists expect good results from biotechnology in expanding world food supply. The scientist expects that technology reaching farmers of developing nations to be a difficult prospect_ mainly from the owners of the technology and misguided government regulations.
Besides genetic improvements, researchers must find other means to expand crop yield, especially through crop management techniques such as conservation tillage. Africa has been involved since 1986 in a project transferring food technology to the Sub-Saharan areas. It is likely to face critical food shortages in the years ahead. Despite being successful in implementing Green Revolution technology to increase grain yields, ensuring food security for the poor millions, especially in South Asia, is a battle far from won.
However, a further example of Dr. Borlaug’s work of the last two decades coming to fruition is the announcement of this year’s winners of the World Food Prize. The co-winners are from Africa and China.
In recognition of the immense potential of the New Rice for Africa (NERICA) for food security and poverty alleviation in the most impoverished region of the world, Dr. Monty Jones, “the Father of NERICA,” has been selected to receive the 2004 World Food Prize.
Dr. Jones, of Sierra Leone, is the first African to receive the prestigious award.
This recognition has a very special significance for Africa as a whole and for NEPAD, in particular, because it underscores the principle of ownership of Africa’s development strategies.
NERICA is a technological breakthrough for Africa, by an African who developed it at an African-led research institute – the Africa Rice Centre (WARDA), in Abidjan, Cote d’lvoire.
NEPAD has placed agricultural growth as the cornerstone of its poverty reduction program and has asked the forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) to be the technical agent for the implementation of the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP).
NEPAD has identified NERICA in the context of the CAADP’s action plan and NEPAD Heads of State and Government Steering Committee has endorsed the expansion of the NERICA throughout Africa. The award to Dr. Jones has come, therefore, as a big boost to CAADP.
NERICA is perfectly adapted to the harsh growing environment and low-input conditions of upland rice ecologies in sub-Saharan Africa, where smallholder farmers lack the means to irrigate and apply chemical fertilizers or pesticides. It responds even better to higher inputs.
It was during his tenure as Head of the Upland Rice Breeding Program and Deputy Director of Research at the Africa Rice Centre, 1991-2002, that Dr. Jones made his extraordinary breakthrough achievement in successfully combining Asian and African rice varieties to develop the NERICA.
His work at the centre has led to the rapid development of more than 3000 NERICA lines, potentially benefiting 20 million rice farmers and 250 million consumers in Africa.
The co-winner from China is Professor Yuan Longping.
Professor Yuan Longping, “father of hybrid rice,” director general of the China National Hybrid Rice Research and Development Center in central China’s Hunan Province, is also an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
World Food Prize President Kenneth Quinn praised both scientists for their “breakthrough scientific achievements, which have significantly increased food security for millions of people from Asia to Africa.”
Yuan and Jones were being honored at a State Department ceremony hosted by Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Yuan is credited with developing the world’s first successful and widely grown hybrid rice varieties, revolutionizing rice cultivation in China and tripling production over a generation.
Jones’ work recaptured the genetic potential of ancient African rices by combining African and Asian rice species, “dramatically increasing yields and offering great hope to millions of poor farmers,” according to the award citation.
U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Director-General Jacques Diouf said it was fitting that rice experts are being awarded the food prize in 2004, the same year dedicated by the United Nations as the International Year of Rice.
“Rice is life,” Diouf said, noting that the staple provides 20 percent of the world’s dietary energy supply.
The prize was created in 1986 by Dr. Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work in developing new technologies for feeding the hungry. The award recognizes people who help improve the quality or availability of food throughout the world.
In recent years Dr. Borlaug has let himself sit down and discuss his life a bit more. What follows are two examples of this.
One article from the Sacramento Bee in June 24, 2003 presents his concerns on biotech grains.
Sacramento, Calif., June 24, 2003 – Nobel Peace Laureate Dr. Norman Borlaug said during a keynote address at the Ministerial Conference and Expo on Agricultural Science and Technology that the 21st Century challenge to agriculture would be producing sufficient supplies of food to sustain the world’s continued population growth.
“The world has the technology, either available or well-advanced in the research pipeline, to feed 10billion people,” said Borlaug. “Extending the Green Revolution to the Gene Revolution will provide a better diet at lower prices to many more food-insecure people.”
According to Borlaug, agricultural scientists have the ability to meet this challenge through continued research and development of technology, including biotechnology, that can expand the yield potential of crops to improve resistance to insect and disease, resistance to herbicides, nutritional quality and abiotic research with fears that are unfounded in light of extensive scientific research. The results are regulation funding for public sector research from the World Bank and many bilateral donors. Bolraug also questioned the rapid consolidation of ownership of life sciences companies and the current intellectual property system.
The Green Revolution of the 1960s, the creation of high-yield crops and more efficient farming methods, saved millions from starvation and advanced conservation of the environment. The production of cereals, such as wheat, maize or rice, which comprise 70 percent of the world food supply, has increased from 650 million tons in 1950 to 1,900 million tons in 2000. During this same period, the land area under cultivation for cereals remained steady at 660 million hectares, sparing 1.1 billion hectares from being plowed at 1950 yield levels.
While poverty is still rampant in Asia, Borlaug stated that Africa remains the region of greatest concern. Declining soil fertility and sparse application of improved technology, coupled with the lack of roads and transport, poor education and health services, high population growth even with the spread of HIV/AIDS, has led to continued chronic hunger for 200 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa and portends an unprecedented humanitarian crisis.
Dr. Borlaug’s leading research achievement was to hasten the perfection of dwarf spring wheat and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work in the developing world, primarily for reversing the food shortages that had plagued India and Pakistan during the 1960s. Since 1986, Dr. Borlaug has been the President of the Sasakawa Africa Association, an international extension program to increase farm production in Africa, and the leader of the Sasakawa-Global 2000 agricultural program in sub-Saharan Africa. Borlaug has also been the Distinguished Professor of International Agriculture at Texas A&M University since 1984.
A longer look at his life and a more historical perspective comes from the Minnesota magazine in January 2004 and is written by Vicki Stavig.
I want to die with my boots on. I will be 90 years old March 25 and am still fighting world hunger by helping farmers in several countries to increase their production. Some people say I’ve saved more lives than any other person in the world, but I take that with moderation. A lot of people have been saved, but my main contribution has been teaching. It was teamwork of all these young scientists I’ve worked with that made the difference.
I won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, for developing a high-yielding, drought-resistant variety of wheat. When I first heard about it I thought someone was playing a trick on me. I was out in the fields in Toluca Valley in Mexico harvesting with five scientists from Romania, Brazil, and Mexico, when my wife, Margaret, drove out to find me. She said, “Someone from a newspaper in Oslo called right after you left this morning and said he urgently needed to talk to you. He said you’ve won the Nobel Peace Prize!”
Two hours later, here comes a car and out climb a cameraman for NBC and a writer for the Christian Science Monitor. They were in Mexico for the Pan American Press Conference and said they saw the news about me come over the wire. They interviewed me and left. Then here come two carloads of Mexican press people. They were mad because the first two guys had paid some kids to give the wrong directions to where I was.
I gave my Nobel Lecture the day after the award ceremony at the University of Oslo. In essence, I said there is no magic in the variety of wheat alone, but that if economic policies would take care of adjusting credit and fertilizer, it would ensure there would be enough production until the year 2000. It turned out I was about right in my estimate. There are two aspects of food and hunger. One is to produce enough food for people in a country and the other is equitability of distribution. In India, for example, you still see large numbers of people who are badly nourished, but there is an abundance of food in government storehouses because there is a lack of purchasing power.
Today I wear three hats. I am a Distinguished Professor of International Agriculture at Texas A&M in College Station; president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, which is working to increase farm production in Africa; and senior consultant to the director general of the International Maize and Wheat Center in Mexico. I also lecture at universities all over the world.
I grew up on a farm near Cresco, Iowa, 10 miles from the Minnesota border. Originally, my ambition was to be high school science teacher and athletics coach. I was captain of the high school football team, was on the wrestling team, and played baseball. After high school, I didn’t have enough money for college, so I stayed in Iowa, but there were no jobs except during the peak harvest seasons.
In February 1933, I entered a Midwest AAU [Amateur Athletic Union] tournament in Cresco. Most of the other entrants were university wrestlers. I hadn’t wrestled for a year but got into the finals and wrestled a person from Iowa State Teachers College. He beat me in overtime. As I was leaving, the Iowa coach said, “You should come to Iowa State Teachers College.” There were no athletics scholarships at that time, but the coach said he would get me a job.
Shortly before I was to leave for Iowa, George Champlin (B.A. ’34), a football player for the University of Minnesota who lived in Cresco, drove up. He said, “My dad said you should be at the University of Minnesota. I’m going to early football practice tomorrow. Come and ride along. You can hitchhike back if you don’t like there.” I went and never came back.
I had a good high school academic record, but when I came to Minnesota they said, “You’re short a year of credits.” At that time Minnesota didn’t count ninth grade as high school, so they said I had to take a special exam. I took it and flunked it and figured, hell, I’m a complete washout. But George took me to see Fred Hovde (B.S. ’29), dean of the General College, which was just starting. George told him what had happened and Hovde said I should start in General College. I spent fall and winter quarters there and had very good grades, so Hovde said I could transfer to any University’s colleges. I went to the forestry college.
I started out playing baseball and wrestling at the University. I wrestled at 145 pounds and at heavyweight. I had to drop out of baseball because our lab classes were in the afternoon, but in wrestling you could work out anytime. I wrestled for three years and at the end of my sophomore year I had a good record. I think I won nine out of 11 bouts.
I was instrumental in bringing Dave Bartelma, my former high school wrestling coach, to the University of Minnesota. He would put me and another wrestler on a bus and send us to parent/teacher meetings at Minnesota schools to demonstrate wrestling. Eventually the sport caught on in high schools. Later, when I was in graduate school at the University, I was the freshman wrestling coach and I refereed the first Minnesota State High School Wrestling Tournament in 1938. I was inducted into the University of Minnesota National M Club Lifetime Achievement Hall of Fame.
I didn’t have money, so occasionally I dropped out of school to work. There were all sorts of emergency programs under President Franklin Roosevelt. I worked for the U.S. Forestry Service off and on from 1935 to 1938. The University gave me a good, broad foundation. I also met my wife Margaret, at the University, where she was studying education, and we married in September 1937. Her brother, George Gibson (B.A. ’30, Ph.D. ’34), was captain of the football team and is now 98 years old.
One day I saw a notice on the bulletin board about a talk by University plant pathologist E.C. Stakman. I went and was very impressed and said, “If I ever have a chance to go to graduate school, I would like to study under him.” When I heard him speak, it changed my life, my whole career.
I got my degree in forestry in 1937 and was scheduled to go on a permanent assignment with the forestry service on January 1, 1938. But I got a letter from them asking me to delay it until the first of June. So I studied under Stakman, and that changed everything. I got my master’s degree in plant pathology in 1939 and my doctorate in 1942. The University had a good, active breeding program for flax, and I worked on that with J.J. Christensen, who was my major professor in the doctorate program.
In 1942, I accepted a job as a microbiologist with the DuPont de Nemours Foundation. I was supposed to work on agriculture chemicals, but war broke out so we worked on evaluation and testing a variety of materials that were used by the armed forces in the tropics. Then in September 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation came to me and said, “We hear you have the background of experience and training we need to start a program with the Mexican government to develop technology for food-deficient countries and to train their scientists.” This was a new program that was funded by the Rockefeller foundation to assist poor farmers in Mexico and to help them increase their wheat production.
So I moved to Mexico. Other than a couple of days in Canada, I had never been out of the country. We lived in Mexico City, because there were English-speaking schools there. When we moved, my daughter, Jean, was a year old. My son, Bill, was born in Mexico. When he was growing up, I helped to organize Little League baseball and spent a lot of time on it. I would leave the experiment station Friday afternoon and drive 300 miles home on miserable roads. I would get home at one or two in the morning, and we would have games on Saturday and Sunday. Then I would drive back to the station.
Initially there were language problems, bad working conditions, and bad food because of the lack of refrigeration. Several times I wished I were back at DuPont. I thought I had made the wrong choice, but then the doom and gloom began to lift - and I’m still there. I go to Mexico the second week of January and stay until the end of August each year.
That program evolved into the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, an international research and training institute with 16 independent centers that are scattered around the world. I was put in charge of coordination all the research going into wheat, and I worked on soil fertility too. Some of the soils in Mexico had been cultivated since long before the Spaniards came to Mexico, so they were at a low level of fertility and we developed methods of fertilizing that soil.
We trained Mexican agriculture scientists and bred high-yield dwarf wheat that resisted a variety of plant pests and diseases and that yielded two to three times more grain than traditional varieties. That wheat sparked what came to be known as the Green Revolution, the idea that plant breeding could end world hunger.
Mexico became self-sufficient in wheat production in 1956, but no longer is because it had 22 million people when I first went and now has more than 100 million people. In 1959, I turned the Mexico program over to the Mexican government. Then the Rockefeller Foundation and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations sent me to several countries - including Egypt and other African countries, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan – to see if there was a need for what we had learned in Mexico. I said, “Pick the best people getting degrees from universities in these countries and send them to me in Mexico. I would like to train them for a couple years.”
In 1960 we expanded the program and began to teach farmers in Pakistan and India to cultivate the new wheat. I also told the young scientists there, “I don’t want to teach you to be rebels in your scientific approach. Don’t try to change everything all at once.” You have to be sensitive to the politics of the country.
There was criticism about what we were doing. Back home in the United States, some of our worst critics said nothing could be done in India with the population and lack of education there. There were predictions of doom and gloom. The Pakistan-India war in 1960 also caused some problems for us. At two different points, I was the only contact between those two countries.
Pakistan’s scientists started coming to Mexico for training in 1960, and in 1968 Pakistan became self-sufficient in wheat production. Pakistan increased its wheat production from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 8.4 million tons in 1970. In 2000, it produced 21 million tons of wheat. India became self-sufficient in wheat and rice in 1972 and by 1982 even became a modest exporter. Wheat production in India increased from 12 million tons in 1965 to 72 million tons in 2002.
The use of high-yield technology has helped farmers produce higher yields on less land and has saved millions of acres of forests and wildlife habitats. In 1960, the world’s grain output was 692 million tons. Four decades later is 1.9 billion tons. That’s a threefold increase using the same amount of land. Had you tried to increase that production using the technology of 1960, you would have had to cut down an additional 1.1 million hectares – a hectare equals 2.5 acres – so what was saved was 1.1 million times 2.5.
I never promise much when I go into a new country. I say, “Let’s see if we have technology that will fit.” It takes two or three years to get a feel for it, to see if it will work. If that technology will only increase yields by 10 or 15 percent, that would be a lot for U.S. farmers because they produce so much, but if you’re near starvation, it’s nothing.
I retired in 1979 and was going to be a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota. I taught for one fall quarter and worked the rest of the year in forest genetics for Weyerhauser Timber Company. Then, in 1981 my successor at the International Maize and Wheat Center in Mexico died, so I returned to run that program. I continue to work there was a consultant to the director general.
In 1984, I got a call from Ryoichi Sasakawa, chairman of the Sasakawa Foundation of Japan. He wanted to know if the Green Revolution’s agricultural methods could be applied to parts of Africa that were suffering from drought and famine. I said I was too old to start something new. I said, “I’ve never heard of those countries,” and hung up.
The next morning he called me back. “Young man,” he said, “I’m 15 years older than you are. We should have started this project yesterday, but let’s get started tomorrow.” I accepted. Ryoichi Sasakawa died five years ago, but I’m still president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, which is working to spread the Green Revolution to Sub-Saharan Africa. We have projects in 10 African countries. This is the toughest part of the world because it doesn’t have an infrastructure. It had tremendous corn crops in the upper elevations, but people were starving in the lower elevations because there was no way to get the corn to them. There were no roads, no railroads. We could double or triple production in some areas, but the cost of bringing in fertilizer is three to four times what U.S. farmers pay.
Lack of roads is a major obstacle. It hinders agriculture, education, and development. Roads bring schools and public health workers, break down cultural barriers, and reduce fear. If you build a road that crosses tribal groups, those people begin to see others and realize that they are not so different from each other.
Over the years, I’ve learned much about agriculture. I’ve also learned much about people. Some of it I didn’t want to know. I learned there is a fear of change, whether it’s in agriculture or anything else. Especially as you move upward in income, there seems to be innate fear in some people that someone might tip over their canoes – and those canoes are pretty comfortable. This is widespread, and it’s dangerous. In developing countries, people in power will say it’s too risky to change things because they’ve struggled to get their positions, and if change fails, they will be held responsible. You have to have courageous leaders.
Hunger and peace are interrelated. Have you ever been hungry – hungry for three or four days? One needs to have that experience. When people are hungry, it disrupts everything. If you were hungry and your children were starving, you would breach the laws pretty easily. You would steal for those children. When you have poverty, hunger, and misery, it’s easy to plant terrorism and all other kinds of “isms.” The world has shrunk. We can’t ignore these problems.
I have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and have received honorary degrees and achievement awards from many universities around the world, but I am most proud of training young scientists to attack these problems in food production and to have seen some big changes.
But millions of people still are undernourished in the world today. Predictions are that the world population will reach about 8.3 billion by 2025. In order to feed those people, I calculate that we will need 1 billion more tons of grain. That means more tons per hectare are needed. There is much work that still needs to be done.
Another perspective that gives us the contrasting views comes from www.fisheries.ifcnr.com in which Dr. Borlaug and Bill Gates and their philosophies are pitted against Prince Charles and his view.
Only Sub-Saharan Africa has failed to flourish, but not from any fault in Borlaug’s formula. Where those techniques are tried, they worked. Corn/maize yields tripled. Crops of wheat, cassava, sorghum and cowpeas also flourished. Ironically, the so called “Green” pressure groups brought such immense pressure that funding from Ford and Rockefeller Foundations dried up for Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” hopes for Africa. Effective obstruction came from so-called environmental and animal rights NGOs that issued dire, doomsday scenarios about the loss of Africa’s wilderness.
A compelling argument that the seemingly irrational resistance by NGOs to allowing the Green Revolution to flourish in Africa stems from inherent racism could be made, particularly for those organizations that believe wildlife and wild places are better off absent the presence of humankind. The racist concept that more food equals better health equals more people equals less habitat for wildlife has been disproved where agricultural self-sufficiency through modern farming techniques prevails. The tendency to procreate child after child to supplement the workforce and replace those lost to hunger and disease diminishes as the workload droops and hunger is held in abeyance. As Atlantic Monthly reported in a lengthy 1997 article about Borlaug, “development is the best contraceptive.”
The environmental groups’ fear that Africa will lose its pristine lands to the plow is also false. Slash and burn farming that destroys rainforest and plains alike are the norm for African subsistence farming. Borlaug’s high yield approach saw a global 170 percent yield in grain production with barely a one percent increase in farmed land.
Today, Borlaug, is an outspoken advocate for the application of modern genetics to develop even more earth-friendly and nutritious crops that can resist disease, provide enhanced nutrients, and exist in a more compatible relationship with nature due to the reduced use of pesticides and ability to produce more on land already dedicated to agriculture rather than increase farm acreage by clearing forests, jungles, and other wild lands.
Borlaug is joined in his vision of feeding the world’s hungry and preserving the earth’s wild places through embracing modern science by another individual whose success in his field has elevated him to celebrity status: Bill Gates of Microsoft fame. Gates, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, endowed the HarvestPlus project of a consortium of research institutions and agencies with $25 million to further research into providing the world’s hungry with crops engineered to provide optimum nutrition (biofortification) and yield. The International Food Policy Research Institute and the International Center for Tropical Agricultural Research lead the effort. HarvestPlus is focused on the world’s hungry children and the crops most widely consumed in developing nations: rice, wheat, corn/maize, beans, cassava and sweat potato. Its approach is to embrace conventional as well as genetically enhanced crop breeding technology to achieve its objectives. It will take the best of modern agricultural science in the fields of crop productivity and environmental sustainability and add enhanced nutrition.
Bill Gates proved to the world that technology can and must advance the condition of the world and its inhabitants in the field of computers and communication. Solving global problems such as hunger should embrace technology in a similar manner.
Still, as exciting and rational as Bill Gates’ helping humankind find practical and environmentally sound ways to address and vanquish hunger, yet another celebrity factors into the issue. This gentleman takes an altogether different point of view, one that eschews the approaches of Borlaug and Gates. His name is Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor. He’s known popularly as Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales as well as the 24th Duke of Cornwall.
Prince Charles is the United Kingdom’s foremost champion of organic farming and one of its most outspoken critics of agricultural biotechnology. The pleasant Prince has infuriated cop scientists around the world with his condemnation of genetically modified (GM) foods and pontifical call for a “GM-free Wales” and a “GM-free Britain.” The tendency of the scientific community is to view the Prince as a genetically inbred dim wit devoid of any understanding of how even the foods he grows “organically” came to be and dismiss him as a needless hindrance to needed scientific enlightenment and evolutionary progress. After Prince Charles every public utterance disdaining agricultural biotechnology, a legion of scientists are quick to pen rebuttals that provide the background in biology and botany arguable unknown to the Prince and belittle him as “one of the most genetically modified organisms” in the world.
Unfortunately, name-calling merits no one and no endeavor positive gain. Prince Charles’ history might shed some light not only on the development of his beliefs but also on how to best fashion a sort of détente where each can allow the other to prosper in peace.
Charles’ siding with the environmental and animal rights NGOs on agricultural matters may seem odd given his affection for hunting. However, his father, Prince Philip who enjoyed safaris in Kenya and tiger hunts in India was also head of the World Wide Fund for Nature/World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Britain. As with any successful politician, Price Charles understands that a public persona that embraces concern for the environment is the preferred path for a public figure desirous of avoiding raucous controversy.
Prince Charles has other motivations other than following in his father’s footsteps. As Duke of Cornwall, Prince Charles’ main source of income separate from the monarchy comes from the vast holdings in Cornwall, 141,072 acres to be exact. Annually, Cornwall generates 15,668,000 pounds or $26,546,303.
The duchy stretches over 25 English counties and counts 250 farms within its borders. The home farm, Highgrove in Gloucestershire, is Prince Charles’ pet organic farming project. Charles believes, and three research projects support, the idea that organic farming is more profitable and provides social and environmental benefits above that of conventional farming. Those conclusions appear valid, particularly for a multi-millionaire dabbling on a 1200-acre plot of prime English farmland.
Norman Borlaug does not disagree. In fact, he encourages the use of organic fertilizer where possible. Where he and Prince Charles diverge is the realm of applied agriculture to the world’s most impoverished lands. As Borlaug points, out in order to provide enough organic fertilizer to ensure sufficient crops to feed masses of malnourished humans would require a herd of livestock so vast that the grain needed to sustain their ability to produce manure would sustain the lack of same needed to feed humans. Borlaug doesn’t condemn organic farming. He simply believes it has its place.
Dr. Borlaug and Bill Gates say feed the people. Prince Charles says preserve the environment. Both high yield farming and genetic engineering also have preserving wild places, wildlife habitat, wild life and nature’s resources as major objectives. The world can accommodate both, just as any modern grocery supermarket contains shelving enough to hold organic, conventional and GM foods. Prince Charles need not be an antagonist in the quest to feed the hungry. In fact all he needs to do is be a good neighbor, something the NGOs do not want to see in view of their ability to exploit Prince Charles’ celebrity status to promote their own agendas.
As we can see Dr. Borlaug’s life remains active, his accomplishments since the 1970s have made a marked difference in China and over the last fifteen years in Africa.
Dr. Borlaug agreed to answer a few questions for this retrospective. Several of his colleagues have also offered perspectives on the man and his life and work. These reflections along with some comments from Dr. Borlaug earlier in Spring 2004 give the world a good idea of where he came from and where he is going.
Dr. Norman E. Borlaug: on himself.
He had to work to pay his room, board, and $25 quarterly tuition. While waiting tables in a Dintytown coffee shop he met coworker Margaret Gibson, his wife-to-be. They hit it off immediately, but it took awhile to find time for dating. Borlaug was juggling a full class schedule, a couple jobs and another love of his life – wrestling. Cresco High School was “ bed” of high school wrestling and Norman Borlaug was one if many outstanding wrestlers from that school. He wrestled on the varsity squad at the University and helped introduce the sport to Minnesota high schools. Dispatched with a bus ticket and 35 cents for meals, he and another U wrestler put on exhibition matches around the state.
“Wrestling taught me some valuable lessons,” he says. “I always figured I could hold my own against the best in the world. It made me tough. Many times I drew on that strength. It was an inappropriate crutch perhaps, but that’s the way I’m made.” Today, Borlaug is a member of the Collegiate Wrestling Hall of Fame.
J. George Harrar, a protégé and former graduate student of Stakman’s at the University of Minnesota, was chosen to head the project. A staff of three scientists was to work on the wheat, and soil problems. Harrar further assembled 21 U.S. scientists and 100 young associates to complete the program’s team. Stakman recommended another of his protégés for the wheat project. “He has great depth of courage and determination,” Stakman wrote. “He will not be defeated by difficulty and he burns with a missionary zeal.” He was describing Borlaug.
In 1944 the young plant pathologist was working for Du Pont chemical company, where he was in charge of research on industrial and agricultural bactericides, fungicides, and preservatives. As soon as the government ruled Borlaug was no longer essential to the war effort, he jumped at the chance to join the Mexican development project. Rejecting Du Pont’s offer to double his salary, temporarily leaving behind his 14-month-old daughter and his pregnant wife, he flew to Mexico City to begin the job of making Mexico self-sufficient in wheat. He knew one word of Spanish.
“Many times in the first five years I wondered, “Why did I ever resign from Du Pont?” Borlaug recalls.
During the first year he trudged into an abandoned research station in northern Mexico. A new wheat variety promoted by the Mexican scientist at the station had resulted in disastrous rust epidemics in 1939, ’40, and ’41. Area farmers came to regard scientists as social parasites. Borlaug spent the night in a broken-down hut while rats scampered over his bedroll. In the morning he set out to visit the local farmers, introducing himself in broken Spanish and asking to borrow a small tractor to plant an experimental crop at the station. The farmers treated him like a crazy man.
Borlaug had to wonder if the project was worth it. His family was 1,000 miles away and his infant son, whom he had never seen, was dying of spina bifida.
The next morning he hauled an old hand plow from the station’s storage shed, got in the harness, and began to cut wavering furrows through the field. The sight attracted some curious Mexican farmers. Out of pity or amusement, they offered him a small tractor. It was one of his more novel ways to procure equipment. Shortly thereafter he had a tractor fabricated from parts of three old junkers.
Life seemed more normal once Borlaug’s wife, Margaret, and his daughter, Jeanie, moved to Mexico City. There the Borlaugs had another child, Billy.
Borlaug credits Margaret for keeping the family together under trying circumstances. Amenities were scant, and Borlaug was off in experiment fields more often than he was home. Borlaug’s approach to fatherhood was typical of the big effort he gave to everything. Concerned that his son wouldn’t have a chance to play baseball, Borlaug helped found the Mexican Little League in 1954. He’d finish in the experiment fields Friday evening, make a six-hour drive to Mexico City, and coach his team on Saturday mornings. His 1957 team went undefeated.
“Those were some mighty tough boys,” Borlaug says with pride nearly 30 years later.
Borlaug is a man who knows “tough.” Breeding his wheat plants involved walking stooped over through the fields, checking the stems from brown pustules of rust. It was all hand labor. Crossing wheat strains to find rust-resistant varieties required removing the male stamen from each bisexual wheat flower. Otherwise the wheat would pollinate itself. It took great concentration to do the delicate work with a tweezers, especially when perched on a stool under the hot Mexican sun.
In nine years of work, Borlaug and his assistants make 6,000 individual crossings of wheat. By 1956 his rust-resistant varieties had helped Mexico double its wheat production and , for the first time, become self-sufficient in grain. And the green revolution had yet to really begin.
The first big step toward the green revolution occurred when Borlaug hiked into that abandoned research station in northern Mexico. It involved an unorthodox procedure and nearly led to Borlaug’s resignation from the project.
The main problems with wheat rust and nutrient-depleted soil were to the south, in the central highlands around Mexico City. Borlaug’s boss, George Harrar, wanted research concentrated in that region. But Borlaug saw a chance to speed the progress of breeding rust-resistant wheat by taking advantage of Mexico’s two growing seasons. In the summer he would breed wheat in the central highlands, then immediately take the seed north to the Yaqui Valley research station. Because of different altitudes and temperatures, crops could be planted back-to-back in the two areas.
This, of course, meant doubling the work. It also contradicted a principle of agronomy that has since been disproved. At the time it was believed that seeds needed a rest between harvest and planting to store energy for germination. Yet Borlaug was talking about planting the seeds immediately after harvest.
When Harrar vetoed the scheme, Borlaug angrily resigned. Fortunately, the mentor of both men, E.C. Stakman, was visiting the project. He not only talked Borlaug into withdrawing his resignation, he convinced Harrar to allow a double season of wheat breeding in areas 700 miles apart.
What nobody guessed was that shuttling the plants back and forth would unsnarl the problem of photoperiodism. Wheat was sensitive to periods of sunlight. If light dropped below a certain level, wheat plants would release an enzyme that shut down growth. This light sensitivity limited the ability of strains of wheat to adapt to different environments around the world. Each geographic area, it was believed, would require a separate breeding program.
“As it worked out,” Borlaug says, “in the north we were planting when the days were getting shorter, at low elevation and high temperature. Then we’d take the seed from the best plants south and plant it at high elevation, when days were getting long and there was lots of rain. Soon we had varieties that fit the whole range of conditions. That wasn’t supposed to happen by the books.”
After 10 years of wheat breeding, Borlaug had plants that resisted rust and other diseases. Because they were insensitive to the length of daylight, they had the potential to grow in a wide variety of climates. Borlaug had gotten two thirds of the pieces he needed for the science of the green revolution. What was missing was a wheat plant that responded well to fertilizer.
To dramatically increase yields grown on Third World lands, drained of nutrients from centuries of farming, fertilizer was required. But traditional wheat varieties, even Borlaug’s disease-resistant stains, tended to collapse under heavy fertilization. The extra grains in the head toppled the long, thin stalks. Borlaug searched for a shorter, stronger stalk; in 1961 he found it in a Japanese semi-dwarf variety called Norin.
Crossing his hybrid wheat with Norin resulted in disease-resistant, widely adaptable wheat that grew like little bushes. Not only did Norin provide a studier stalk, it tillered – sending up multiple stalks from its base. This meant more heads of wheat per plant. And with heavy fertilization, those heads grew fat with grain.
By 1963, 95 percent of Mexico’s wheat lands grew the new semi-dwarf seeds of the green revolution. The result: a harvest six times the 1944 level, the year Borlaug arrived in Mexico.
Even Borlaug had trouble believing the adaptability of the new seed. Test plots around the world began to show similarly dramatic gains in yield. Climates from Sweden to Argentina would prove acceptable to the new seed. Borlaug had more than accomplished the goal of the Mexican project. Mexico was not only self-sufficient in wheat, it had grain to export. Mexican farmers, who a few years earlier didn’t know how to use fertilizer, became international seed dealers, supplying the green revolution in other countries.
Using semi-dwarf seed, Pakistan became self-sufficient in wheat within three years. National animosity helped the cause in this case. Pakistan ordered its first big shipment of seed less than one year after its archrival, India, became committed to the green revolution.
Between 1965 and 1972 the green revolution more than doubled India’s wheat production, making it the third largest producer in the world. Side benefits included new fertilizer plants and tractor factories. In one year, village cooperatives sand 200,000 wells to tap India’s plentiful groundwater.
The revolution needed trained workers, and Borlaug proposed a training program “in the new aggressive approach to modern agronomy.” More than 20 nations sent young agronomists to Borlaug’s program in Mexico. Politics made no difference in this revolution. Russians learned along with Poles, Israelis along with Turks. To make sure his “wheat apostles,” as they were sometimes called, had the right stuff, Borlaug would start them with back-bending labor 12 hours a day in the fields.
It was common for young agronomists from developing countries to view themselves as elite. They much preferred the idea of writing reports in air-conditioned offices to working with sweating peasant farmers. Borlaug’s first young Mexican assistants insisted on wearing suits into the fields. The tasks Borlaug set them quickly turned the suits into rags. Khaki work clothes and baseball caps became the uniform of the green revolutionaries. While working like the small farmers they were to help, they learned Borlaug’s techniques for fertilization, wheat breeding, and soil analysis.
Winter 2004 –
A fitting capstone to Dr. Borlaug’s 90th year was a tribute that verified him as a true world humanitarian. On a Saturday in winter 2004, Dr. Borlaug, accompanied by Dr. Muscoplat and other colleagues gathered at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis. He even was the unveiling of the “Warden of Peace.” There at the ceremony of blessing for his work Dr. Borlaug, “Norm,” was able to gaze upward and see a 30 foot tall stained window. In the window along with other world stage players such as Mother Teresa and Mahatma Ghandi was the grain revolutionary from Cresco, Iowa in a life size and holding a fistful of wheat. The man was here acknowledged for saving millions of lives and as one great humanitarian of civilization.
On his 90th birthday Dr. Borlaug received hundreds of emails wishing him a happy birthday. I close with the inclusion of several of these as means of letting people see the scope of his respect and admiration.
Celebrating the life of a great humanitarian.

Dear Friends:

Ninety years ago on March 25, 1914, he was born at Cresco, Iowa and almost single handedly transformed the world into a better place for all of us. Norman Borlaug is a legend and an institution. So few regular people have ever heard of him and yet he has transformed the lives of more people than one.
For many of us, Dr. Borlaug a messiah, who embodies Luther Burbank, George Washington Carver, Mahatma Ghandi and Mother Theresa rolled into one! A tireless advocate of using science for the betterment of humankind. A champion wrestler during his college days still with a fighting spirit for the causes he believes . An ever optimist, he has little patience for those who irrationally oppose the use of technology in agriculture and for naysayers and doomsday believers.
I feel blessed to have known this great man. As a young college freshman studying agriculture in India more than thirty years ago, I listened to his lecture once. I was so inspired that I decided to major in plant breeding and genetics with the hope that I can tread in his foot steps in my own small way. Of course, growing up as a child in the sixties in India, I had personally experienced the magic of green revolution. Since then, I have seen how it has transformed my native land from a begging bowl into an agricultural superpower.
So, please join me and AgBioWorld in celebrating the 90th birthday of this remarkable individual and in thanking him for his ninety wonderful years in serving the humanity. I am sure you all have received the humanity. I am sure you all have received the earlier press release sent on AgBioView.

With hearfelt regards,

One Billion Humans
Statement on Norman Borlaug by Senator ‘Kit’ Bond in the U.S. Senate

- U.S. Congressional Record (March 22, 2004); page S.2856.Page:S2856

Mr. President, it is my distinct privilege to rise today to pay special tribute to the one of the world’s most foremost physiologists, Dr. Norman Borlaug. Dr. Borlaug is widely credited as the father of the 1960s Green Revolution, a movement that has continued to cure hundreds of millions of people around the globe from starvation. It is very likely that Dr. Borlaug is directly responsible for saving more lives than anyone else in the twentieth century.
Born in Cresco, IA on March 25, 1914, Dr. Borlaug was raised on a livestock farm before attending the University of Minnesota as a biology student and a member of the University’s wrestling team. After graduation, in addition to being inducted to the Iniversity’s Hall of Fame fro his wrestling record, Dr. Borlaug carefully balanced teaching while successfully working on the fevelopment of several new strains of disease-resistant wheat. The new strand of wheat went on the be widely utilized in Mexico, Pakistan, and India and led to dramatic increases in food production, in turn earning Dr. Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. The Dallas Morning News attests his lifelong dedication to physiology to growing up among the food shortages of the Great Depression: “The sight of farm failures, sheriff’s sales and hungry children would stay with him and influence his choices for the rest of his life.” Dr. Borlaug added in his own words, “I saw all that unfold. And I think that had something to do with how things turned out.”
Dr. Borlaug has certainly earned the right to slow down after his many years of hard work, but he continues, even at age 90, to be a leader in the development and implementation of new technologies, in effect, ensuring the world’s most needy adequate food supplies. He often travels to Asia and Africa, Europe and Latin America to help the public understand the value and potential of new biotechnology, while respecting and preserving the environment. In addition to his efforts globally, Dr. Borlaug is helping farmers make a living by leady the fight against wealthy and well-fed anti-technology protectionists in Europe.
Some would rest after a Nobel Peace Prize and many others would certainly take the opportunity to reward themselves and their family – deservedly – by answering lucrative offers from the private sector. In a world where 800 million children are hungry and even more live on less than a dollar a day, Dr. Borlaug has never stopped fighting, teaching, inventing, or caring. It is clear that Dr. Borlaug is inspired by the rewards his efforts yield for others.
Missouri’s renowned plant scientist, George Washington Carver words are appropriate when used to describe Dr. Borlaug: “No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.” So very few of a talented world, billions strong, has met this test to the extent that Dr. Borlaug has. He has selflessly and tirelessly developed his gifts from God on behalf of millions and billions of desperate people he does not know, and who will never know whom to thank.
I also thank Mrs. Borlaug and the rest of the Borlaug family, on the behalf of the people of the State of Missouri, America, and throughout the world, for sharing Norman’s attention for all these years.
Dr. Borlaug will soon gain status as the world’s youngest 90 year old. I speak for all in thanking him for his lifelong dedication to agriculture and I sincerely wish him a happy birthday. The world owes Dr. Borlaug endless amounts of gratitude and we will look forward to celebrating his achievements again on his 100th birthday.
Recognizing a giant of our time: Dr. Norman Borlaug turns 90

Thomas R. DeGregori, Health Facts and Fears, March 22, 2004

The greatest good is often that which is unnoticed and unknown. Not least amount our blessings are the bad things that do not happen and are therefore invisible to us. The benefits of modern science and technology permeate every aspect of our lives but remain largely unnoticed, while the occasional problems of modern life get widely trumpeted, depicted as the norm rather than the exception. Various groups have an interest in keeping us worried about what allegedly harms us while they remain silent about what keeps us going day in and day out. Counting our blessings is too often saved for special occasions and taken for granted the rest of the time.
HAPPY 90th BIRTHDAY, DR. NORMAN BORLAUG!
For fifty-two years, Dr. Norman Borlaug has been helping to provide more food to the most needy areas of the world. But perhaps of greater importance, this distinguished scientist-philosopher has been demonstrating practical ways to give people of the entire world a higher quality of life …
The passion that drives Dr. Borlaug’s life is an inspiration for all of us to follow. Since 1986, we’ve worked together through Global 2000 of The Carter Center and the Sasakawa Africa Association to help small-scale farmers to improve agricultural productivity and crop quality, sometimes two or even threefold. It has been an honor to collaborate with Dr. Borlaug. He is a true humanitarian and a dear friend.

Jimmy Carter, former U.S. president

Dr. Norman Borlaug was the father of the Green Revolution that transformed much of the hungry Third World. As U.S. Food for Peace Administrator in the 1960s, I shipped 4 million tons of food aid per year to India; now it can export food. Dr. Borlaug’s scientific leadership not only saved people from starvation, but the high-yield seeds he bred saved millions of square miles of wildlife from being plowed down. He is one of the great men of our age.

The Honorable George McGovern, Former US Senator, UN “Ambassador to the Hungry”

“Norman Borlaug is the living embodiment of the human quest for a hunger free world. His life is his message.”

“It is very likely that Dr. Borlaug is directly responsible for saving more lives than anyone else in the twentieth century …..Dr. Borlaug has never stopped fighting, teaching, inventing, or caring …..The world owes Dr. Borlaug endless amounts of gratitude”

Dr. Norman Borlaug is the first person in history to save a billion human lives. But he must also get credit for saving wild creatures and diverse plant species on 12 million square miles of global forest that would long since have been plowed down without the high-yield farming he pioneered. The two accomplishments combined make him dramatically unique. I am proud to work with the Center for Global Food Issues, if which he is Chairman Emeritus.

Senator Rudy Boschwitz, R-MN, former member of the IS Senate Agriculture Committee

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb …But Borlaug and his team were already engaged in the kind of crash program the Ehrlich declared wouldn’t work. Their dwarf wheat varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties …Borlaug, who, unfortunately, is far less well-known than doomsayer Ehrlich, is responsible for much of the progress humanity has against hunger.

Ron Bailey, Reason Magazine

Though barely known in the country of his birth, elsewhere in the world Norman Borlaug is widely considered to be amount the leading Americans of our age …Norman Borlaug has already saved more lives than any other person who ever lived.
Borlaug is responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in Sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster then the human population, averting the mass starvations that were widely predicted – for example, in the 1967 bestseller Famine – 1975! The form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths.

Gregg Eaterbrook, The Atlantic Monthly

At a time when doonsayers were hopping around saying everyone was going to starve, Norman was working. He moved to Mexico and lived among the people there until he figured out how to improve the output of the farmers. So that saved a million lives.
Then he packed up his family and moved to India, where in spite of a war with Pakistan, he managed to introduce new wheat strains that quadrupled their food output. So that saved another million.

James Glassman, Tech Central Station

He is credited with starting the Green Revolution in the nid-1960s and saving millions of lives from starvation. Since 1984, he has been a professor in international agriculture at Texas A&M, where is teaches one semester a every year. But he is by no means semi-retired. At age 86, he remains as active as ever – carrying his brand of prairie pragmatism to fight hunger around the world and in the classroom. Think big. Fight complacency. That is the essence of his message, whether he’s talking to heads of state or college freshmen.

David Tarrant, Dallas Morning News

Scientist. Teacher. Humanitarian. Nobel Laureate. Father of the Green Revolution. Those terms describe Dr. Norman Borlaug, who is distinguished professor of international agriculture at Texas A&M University, but they can’t possibly capture the magnitude of his accomplishments.

Ellen Ritter, Texas A&M University

If there’s one thread running through Borlaug’s life it’s doing – acting with fierce determination. Working on a problem as fundamental as world hunger is a complicated business, and Borlaug is a complicated man, somehow balancing contradictions.
He is the scientist and the dirt farmer; the advocate of common sense and the master of political subtleties; the humanitarian and the pugnacious fighter; the idealist and the consultant to governments of every political ideology. He has been called a peaceful revolutionary and the tension in that term – between benevolence and aggressiveness – seems particularly apt.

From the University of Minnesota College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Science

You get it? But he wasn’t done. He did the same thing with a new rice in China. He’s doing the same thing in Africa – as much of Africa as he’s allowed to visit.
When he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, they said he had saved a billion people. That’s BILLION! Carl Sagan BILLION with a B! And most of them were a different race from him.
Norman is the greatest human being, and you probably never heard of him.

Penn Jillette, of the comedy team Penn and Teller

Thanks to the Green Revolution, the real price of food is half or less than it was in 1960 which means those who spend the highest portion of their income on food – the urban and non-farm rural poor – garner the most benefit from it.

Thomas R. DeGregori, University of Houston

Borlaug’s work saved the Indian sub-continent from mass starvation. In his 90 years on this planet its human population has grown from about one billion to more than six billion. Without the hybrid wheats it was Borlaug’s life’s mission to develop and promote among the world’s poorest farmers, few believe that this population could have been sustained.

Matthew Parris, The Times(UK)

As a result of [Borlaug’s] work, a billion people now exist who otherwise would have starved to death, died of starvation-related diseases, or never have been born.

Borlaug is one of the great humanitarians of the 20th century – and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for a lifetime of work feeding a hungry world. The breeds of wheat he developed with strong disease resistance, high yield potential and the ability to withstand poor growing conditions – led the “Green Revolution” that saved literally hundreds of millions of lives in developing nations that were prone to terrible famines.
The Norman Borlaug Rap (Thank you, Norman)
I don’t know what you been told